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In a tough market, Emerson chases SMBs
In a tough market, Emerson chases SMBs
By Robert Clark | Jan 7, 2010
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In a tough year for the economy, businesses have had to forage creatively for new sales.
US engineering and power supply firm Emerson has felt the chill as much as any one else. Sales in its network power division dropped 15% for the year and a 22% in the September quarter.
With its $1.2 billion acquisition of Avocent in December, it clearly sees a big future for itself in the data center market.
But Russell Perry, Asia-Pac marketing director for Emerson network power, says the group this year also turned its focus to on small and medium businesses.
Emerson has been trying to carve out a consultancy role with its SMB customers, Perry said in an interview.
“That’s really started to drive our business - to take an active role in the discussion. We will walk customers through steps to help them ‘right-size’” their power systems, he said.
“We say you need to look at your entire data center. There’s no point in looking at just power and cooling, even though it accounts for 50% of data center energy consumption.”
Instead of using the PUE (power usage effectiveness) metric, Emerson is encouraging organizations to measure energy efficiency per unit.
“Consumption is really a response to the work that is done in the data center,” Perry says.
He says the energy efficiency discussion has changed since the oil price spiked at $150 a barrel in mid-2008, but it has left legacies. Many organizations still suffer from a disconnect between the facilities team, which is responsible for the electricity budget, and the IT guys who run the computing.
“Facilities managers and IT guys still some way apart. The ICT environment is very specialized,” Perry said.
Despite that, he believes customers are willing to spend money on energy efficiency - in order to cut costs rather than carbon.
“Not necessarily a lot of money, but they’re in the market for dashboard-type products that tell them what’s going on in their data centers – capacity, run-time, rack load, etc.
“They understand that their businesses need always-on availability.”
